Quick guide: Marketing

That's not really what I'm saying, though - I'm saying that selling ONLY based on offering diversity doesn't get best results. You are correct that I tend to think in terms of larger markets, and I am a traditionalist, it's true. But...if you actually take a close look at what you're doing, I think you're going to find that you're following what I outlined here, believe it or not.

Well, context is important. I've been a non-fiction writer for most of my career due to my fiction career being destroyed by the Lord of the Rings glut back around 2002. I have next to no social media presence to work with (I'm a very private person, and having to change my cell phone number due to my abuser harassing me on it while forgetting to update the double-factor authentication has permanently locked me out of any Facebook presence thanks to Facebook being, well, Facebook), and my novel concept is incredibly niche. And yet...my numbers are about average for a novel here despite these problems. So, you may see underperformance in comparison to a webcomic with a less niche concept, but I'm watching my fiction readership rebuild for the first time in 20 years, and I'm pretty damned stoked about that.

Now, onto this:

I don't doubt that it helped you find that audience. Here's the thing, though...this is your blurb:

Rekki has always dreamed of being a magical knight and giving demons the smackdown, but when Excalibur is drawn and this simple childhood wish comes true, her adult life as a celebrated monster-slaying hero throws her into a complex world of politics that tears a rift between her and her best friend.

Errant is a colourful action comic about power, responsibility, justice, love and friendship with LGBTQIA+ themes, big magical monster fights and lots of relationship drama.

So, here's the thing: you've done everything on my list. You've identified your primary selling point ("her adult life as a celebrated monster-slaying hero throws her into a complex world of politics that tears a rift between her and her best friend."), you've told us who the protagonist is ("Rekki has always dreamed of being a magical knight and giving demons the smackdown, but when Excalibur is drawn and this simple childhood wish comes true"), and your secondary selling points are clear. You outline your main themes ("Errant is a colourful action comic about power, responsibility, justice, love and friendship"), and all of this is done BEFORE you ever mention diversity issues. The reader thus knows that there's a great story to be had here, and some diverse characters on top of that.

I identified three forms of PR seppuku: Forgetting to tell the reader what the book is about, being toxic, and leading with diversity issues, and you avoided every single one. Furthermore, I said that to sell a character from a marginalized group, you have to sell the whole character, and not just their skin colour, sexuality, etc., and you do that perfectly for Rekki.

(Compare this to the recent PR for The Rings of Power, where one of the actors who plays a black elf was mainly just talking about the fact that his character was black...and we learn NOTHING else about the character: https://ew.com/tv/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-cover-story/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=entertainmentweekly_ew%20&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=%20link&utm_term=202208021)

So, you might take issue with how I've worded this, and that's fine. There's plenty of people who have a knee jerk reaction to a character of colour showing up that amounts to "Black person! WOKENESS!", and they drive me crazy too - I'm a centrist...I take issues with both sides of the political spectrum. I can understand why you might be concerned. However, I do have to point out that the concepts I'm outlining are solid...and you're using them to succeed.

Sadly, I am an abuse survivor, so there is a pretty heartbreaking answer to the "damn, who hurt you" thing (and no, I'm not going to go into any further details). It's not directly related to this. It does, however, keep me off of a lot of social media, because the normalization of abusiveness makes things like Twitter REALLY bad places for somebody like me to be, and it makes me pretty aware of when somebody in a PR department starts gaslighting the public (because I've had my share of gaslighting inflicted on me).

The thing is that you're not wrong - diversity has become something that causes a knee-jerk reaction on both sides of the aisle. But, I don't think it's enough to just say "here's the problem with how it is being done," even though you are right that I wrote this quick guide because I saw one more piece of PR seppuku and I had just had enough - you have to say how to do it right. You have to walk people through how to think out their selling points and prioritize them. There are people here telling stories about amazing, diverse characters, and the last thing they need is to be dismissed as woke trash when they try to bring their work to the greater public (and make no mistake, I hope they will bring their work to the greater public some day).

(Hell, I'm a Russian Jew - I'm from a marginalized group, one that even the woke hate, and I can count on one hand the number of Biblical epics I've seen about the Old Testament that felt like they could have come from my religion - Noah and Gods and Kings...that's all that comes to mind. Everybody else Christianizes God. So, I know what it's like to see people supposedly represent you and get it wrong.)

The subject can't be talked about unless somebody...well...TALKS about it. And yeah, there are people who are going to have knee-jerk reactions, and who can blame them? You've got one side calling out anybody who objects as a racist, and the other calling out anybody who isn't a white heterosexual character as woke. There's no winning.

I stand by everything I wrote in this - and I will clarify, novellists, please DO talk about your diverse characters! But don't reduce them in your marketing to their skin colour or sexuality - they're so much more than that, and the full tapestry of who they are is what readers will fall in love with and want to see. DO talk about the diversity of your cast and your themes, but don't forget that they are part of a larger picture, and not even the most important part. Sell ALL the important aspects of your work, not just a tiny sliver.

I'm pretty sure they didn't make any money off that - they booked at least a $100 million loss from what I understand. That said, there's actually a really interesting video about why the PR has become this bad by a former network executive. The short version is that new university graduates cost a lot less than experienced professionals with years of proven experience, and a bunch of places like Amazon and Disney started hiring people right out of university to do PR who didn't really know what they were doing. The video is right here:

From what I've been able to gather, the road to where we are now with the word has a few more steps. I can't claim complete accuracy with this timeline - it's just based on what I've observed as a Canadian looking at the American political and pop culture scene from the outside.

It was co-opted at one point by the activist left and for a while came to refer to anybody who was ware of social issues, rather than just those in a particular group (such as the African-American community). The meaning was still fairly benign at that point. But, there were two moments that seemed to really radicalize the two sides of the political aisle, and those were the election of Barrack Obama for the American right, and the election of Donald Trump for the American left.

I think it would be wrong to depict these as inciting incidents. The real inciting incident, as far as I can tell, was the 2008 Financial Crisis. What seemed to happen after that was that the discontent with the system manifested in a radicalization on the right (mainly the Tea Party) along with pushback forcing the other side farther left, and then the election of Donald Trump just pushed the left the rest of the way. And, by the time Trump was elected, this had started manifesting in a full blown culture war. I've spent a lot of my career covering pop culture, and there was a distinct increase in hostility after 2008.

(And even Donald Trump really seemed to me to be more of a molotov cocktail thrown at Washington than an actual serious attempt to elect a workable president. Watching the Republican primaries was FASCINATING - the Republicans did NOT want that man as their candidate, and I remember a couple of articles about the RNC considering changing their primaries rules so that Trump wouldn't win. This was a massive populist "F--- you!" sent to the people in power.)

So, there has been this entrenchment of the two sides that I've seen over the last 14 years, and the way this has manifested on the activist left (and I am using this term to differentiate it from the rest of the left) has been this tendency towards championing things like diversity in a way that is reductionist to the point of absurdity (all black people = victims, all white people = oppressors, etc.) frequently not associated with any actual concrete action, and attempting to silence anybody who dissents (which is now known as cancel culture). The word "woke" has come to be associated with this.

(The far right is pretty nuts too, just in case anybody is worried that I'm picking sides, but the question is the development of the word "woke" into the negative connotations that it has right now, which means talking about what happened on the far left.)

Speaking personally, I gave up on serious pop culture commentary a couple of years ago because of the toxicity. I'd been involved in it to some degree or another since 2000, when I wrote one of the first online video games issues columns in the English language. There was a time when a female Counterstrike player came out and talked about her experience with sexism in the online community, and the general reaction from the community could be summarized as "I had no idea - thank you for sharing this!" That is unimaginable today. I don't actually know if a true marketplace of ideas in the discourse is possible anymore - nobody seems to want to build bridges. Back during the "Puppy wars" I saw members of the supposedly morally upright science fiction community making unironic voter suppression comments that would have been on the wrong side of the civil rights struggle - it was horrifying.

The thing is that OUTSIDE of the discourse, most of the actual population are not members of the far left or far right - they're moderates. One can only hope that one day they regain their voice, but there's a lot of fear out there of cancellation, which I think is one of the reasons this has gone on as long and gotten as bad as it has.

So, sorry to be a downer, but that's what I saw looking in from Canada as a centrist.

Well, you wanted to know why the word changed into something with negative connotations - that's the road I saw, and it went through American politics and the culture wars they caused. I physically can't chart that path without talking about them. My view was from the outside looking in - somebody from the United States might have a different view.

Damned if I know without actually reading the story.

If it was a story in which the protagonist is nothing more than a caricature whose main point of characterization is their sexuality, and every single other character is a caricature whose characterization is based solely on their skin colour or sexuality, with next to no exploration of their lives or the complexities of the issues they face, then I would say that falls under the negative connotation of "woke" that right now exists (and, I imagine the people you were writing it for wouldn't enjoy it much either - something I've noticed about the works that meet that negative connotation is that the only people they please are the far left activists).

And if it's not that, I don't see how it could meet the definition of the negative connotation of "woke".

But that's just me and what I've been able to ferret out about it. I've seen a number of characters and stories that I wouldn't define as "negative connotation of woke" in a hundred years condemned for being just that.

Well, you probably won't like the answer, but because at this point they're linked, for better or worse.

Here's how this should work (and how, 10 years ago, it would have worked) - I'd have talked about identifying your selling points, how to priortize and order them, and left it at that. No discussion of how to avoid PR seppuku, no discussion of diversity marketing one way or the other. And then, I'd end by saying that if you want to see good examples in action, look at Disney, and Marvel, and CBS, and the BBC, and so on..

You might be starting to see the problem here. Every single exemplar that comes to mind to give seems to be in a race to find the fastest way to alienate their own fanbases. There's a massive negative example that stands as the elephant in the room, and it has to get addressed somehow. I honestly don't like having to do it, but I'm also REALLY tired of watching it play out, and if just one person reads this, goes on to get big, and DOESN'T make these mistakes, I'll call it a win.